Bug Description

Binary package hint: plymouth

With yesterdays (15.04.2010) updates the file /etc/modprobe.d/radeon-kms.conf was removed.
Sideeffect of this removal was:
- before this update I had no plymouth at all but some "ASCII-art" which looked like what should look like a plymouth boot screen. As far as I know this was intended for video-adapters with <32MB video-ram.
- after yesterdays removal of radeon-kms.conf it looks like I have working plymouth boot screen but at start up it looked somewhat garbled (see attached photo). However... after some time of booting the screen "normalizes" and looks like how plymouth should look. Some time means some seconds before I can see gdm.

Following debugging on IRC it seems that the issue is not kernel version dependant. Plymouth is no using the drm renderer by default. It appears to not be correctly taking account of bits-per-pixed for older framebuffers. Moving to plymouth.

yes, triggered by plymouth's unconditional use of the drm renderer for radeon when available - instead of falling back to the fb renderer on systems with a single display output, as we did prior to 0.8.2.

Actually it has worked quite well for several weeks now during startup. Only the additional text during routine disk checks is somewhat hazy and flickering. Not sure when it started to work. I thought I had watched all updates applied, but I must have missed it somehow.

During shutdown the problem still exists. Colours are messed up completely in 99% of the cases and the graphics is not sharp. (I believe I have.seen it working correctly very few times, though)

@Jean Traullé : which only shows the bug is more common than the original reporter thought and stated in the topic. There have been broader bug reports but they were all marked as duplicates of this one. Which means there's no better place for me or Thomas Uhl to seek help (I have this problem on Radeon 3470).

Unconfirmed but not-completely-impossible hypothesis: I think it may be something not in plymouth but in grub instead. Grub updated scripts in /etc/grub.d/. I had to re-enable gfx mode. Once I did it plymouth worked well.

We had to create our own (rather ugly) workaround by setting the `bits_per_pixel` fixed at `4` instead of using `Window.GetBitsPerPixel (); ` in `opt/ltsp/i386/lib/plymouth/themes/ubuntu-logo/ubuntu-logo.script`.

It's a shame this one didn't got fixed as it affects all users with mentioned (embedded) graphics cards, eg. multiples of thousands, instead of the 36 actually following this bug.